Cloverfield: Interview With Director, Matt Reeves

With Cloverfield now in theaters and audiences still asking a plethora of questions, it’s a good thing that we were in New York to sit down with director Matt Reeves. I myself had some questions about the movie, so trust me that this interview was an eye-opener. We covered everything from the monster, to the possibility of a sequel, survivors, and how the teaser trailer came to be.

With an ending like Cloverfield had, and all the loose ends, the possibility of a sequel is probably one of the hottest questions out there. When Reeves was asked if he could see himself directing a sequel, he energetically replied:

“Sure, if i think the movie that sort of came out of [Cloverfield] was compelling for all of us. This idea was so compelling to do and we had so much fun in doing it because we had never done anything like it. So i think we would want to find a similar challenge to this, to find it having its roots in this but be fresh and new because otherwise you are just repeating yourself.”

That’s fine and dandy but when push comes to shove, I just don’t know where you could begin or even start to formulate a sequel that is similar to the experience of Cloverfield. So when asked what a sequel could look like Reeves told us that:

“There was a guy who was off the side of the bridge and Hud sees him filming, so he turns and sees the ship that has been capsized and sees the headless Statue of Liberty and then turns back…and [the other guy] is briefly filming him. And so in my mind that was two movies intersecting for a brief moment. And I thought that there was something really interesting in the idea that this incident happens and there are so many different points of view, and in a way there are several other movies at least that are going on that evening and we just saw one piece of another. We would have to see if anyone would even want a sequel and see how the movie does. If the movie does well and there is a compelling reason to do so, I think it would be fun to do a sequel.”

So if you want a sequel, I guess you should invite some friends and buy some tickets.

I personally thought that Cloverfield‘s teaser was the best ever. We all know it was a brilliant piece of marketing, but where did J.J. Abrams, Bryan Burk and Matt Reeves come up with it?

“When we were all kids, there was one particular trailer that I think we can all remember. That was the trailer for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There was an amazing teaser trailer with all this weird kind of documentary footage. We were like ‘what was that! I’ve got to see that! What the hell was that!?!’ You didn’t know who was in it, and before the trailer came out you didn’t even know what close encounters meant. And that was an exciting thing to have that sense of discovery.”

Well once the public discovered 1-18-08, it was a madhouse to find out what it was all about. There were a ton of theories, and one which was my favorite can actually be blamed on the fast talking director.

“When we were making the teaser trailer, we were mixing and saying to eachother that it was important that you know it was a creature. There was stuff on the roof like ‘what kind of animal sounds like that?’. It was the end of the mix…and they were upset at us ‘guys you’ve got to finish this trailer, you’re not going to make Transformers’, so I jumped up and said ‘I saw it, it’s alive, it’s huge!’. I came home and everybody was convinced, because I speak way too quickly apparently, that I said ‘it’s a lion, it’s huge’, instead of ‘it’s alive’. And I thought ‘how could anyone think it was a lion?’, and then I found out that there was a giant robot Voltron and that kind of stuff was going on every day.”

And now on to the “star” of the film, the monster. Everyone wants to know more about it right?

“The little secret that we had was that the monster was a baby. And so the monster was suffering from separation anxiety and was actually disoriented and pissed…and was terrified. To me, that was the most important aspect of the creature…not only was he furious and in a rage, but that he was scared. To me there is nothing scarier than something that is huge, and is spooked.”

I know you all might be asking about the splash at the end or even the voice after the credits. The cast told me that there were two survivors, so I wanted an answer from the man in charge.

“Are there two survivors? Where are you getting this information? Who are you talking to? No comment, I have to go! Oh the cast said that there was two survivors, that’s because the cast wants to be in more movies. There are also two things at the end of the movie. There is the voice that you are referring to, but in the final shot…there’s a little something. The stuff at Coney Island, there’s a little something there. There’s something dropping in the water.”

There you have it, go no further for your Cloverfield questions because we have the scoops here at Film School Rejects.

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